John McCain
John McCain is an actor, born 1936.
This is a filmography only in the loosest possible sense. John McCain was a United States Navy officer and then a politician, in the House of Representatives from 1983 and in the Senate from 1987 until his death in 2018, representing Arizona across more than thirty-five years in Congress, and the Republican nominee for president in 2008. He never acted in anything. Every credit gathered here is him.
What the list actually records is a career conducted largely on television. The interview programmes do most of the work: 60 Minutes, Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, Fox News Sunday, Anderson Cooper 360. Alongside them sit the late-night appearances, The Daily Show and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which is its own small comment on how American politics operated in that period.
The rest is archive footage, and that is the more interesting category. Once a public figure has been filmed for forty years, the footage becomes raw material for other people's arguments: Before the Flood (2016) uses him on climate, The House I Live In (2012) on drug policy, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021) on the wars that shaped his Senate career, Mike Wallace Is Here (2019) on the television interview as a form, Religulous (2008) in passing. Killing Them Softly (2012) is a crime film that runs political speech underneath its scenes, and he is in that too. A person keeps appearing in other people's films long after the fact, which is what a long public life leaves behind.
Movies (7)
TV (13)
- The Daily Show (1996)
- Meet the Press (1947)
- 60 Minutes (1968)
- The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992)
- Anderson Cooper 360° (2003)
- Fox News Sunday (1996)
- Face The Nation (1954)
- The Circus (2016)
- This Week (1981)
- Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021)
- The American West (2016)
- First Ladies (2020)
- The Seventies (2015)
Where to start with John McCain
Treat Mike Wallace Is Here as the entry point. It is a documentary about the television interview itself, assembled almost entirely from archive, and it shows what a politician of McCain's era was actually doing on camera when a serious interviewer had him at length.
After that, pick by subject rather than by him. The House I Live In is the strongest film on this page and uses his footage inside a much larger argument about American drug policy. Before the Flood does something comparable with climate. Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror is the long-form account of the period that defined his time in the Senate. Religulous is the odd one out, a comic polemic that uses him in passing.
Killing Them Softly is the curiosity, a crime film that plays political speech under its scenes so that his voice arrives as texture rather than as testimony. 60 Minutes is where much of the raw material came from in the first place.